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Kim Taplin

from Goodfellow

A long hard tarmacked road to be walkedto get even a riff or sniff of him -the metaphors themselves are sunken-eyedand no longer shining, or have shedmost of their petals. Or there are human leeches.Burroughs knew the score when he saidto AVOID the vampires of the spirit.

Out of my window I can see the streamrunning between old willows to the river,a small hill, fruit trees, a few dunnocks.There’s a warm wind, making a gruff sound,and little squalls of lightly flung rain.A crow chases a heron the length of the river.This is it, there’s nature and there’s weatherplus our contrivances for being here,always more elaborate and bland

Laugh your green woodpecker’s laugh Hob Goblin in the branches of chainstores and bankswhere no wild thyme and among manu- facturing plants!

Later barking in a hoarse high voiceand a sliver moon as night comes down.All the best poets bear witnessto the good character of night.Whitman praises the tender and growing nightalso the magnetic and nourishing night.Dream-work, psyche’s work, that’s on the night shift:David Jones who knew depression’s darkspoke of the inner labyrinthand also named the darkness of earthwhere is exacted the night-labour.

Galway Kinnell says half his life belongsto the wild darkness. Owns the mix.An owl hooting by day foretold deathand Hudson unearthed the dark truththat turning our visions inward on such occasionswe are startled by a glimpse of our night sideand harbour strange and unexpected guests.Shirk the work, he troubles you in sleep:strips you, even tips you onto the cold floor.

One night I dreamed of him as the cess-pit man,he knocked on the door at 3 a.m.Stocky, uncouth, a brown-overalled angel.Cloven hoof had become cleft palate.I was scared shitless and fled upstairsbut my mother who is losing speech herselfknew what he wanted as old wives do.

I didn’t know it was him till much laterwhen my dearest friend passed me The Military Orchidsaying ‘I think you might like this, it’s gotstuff in about old botanical hooks’and there he was on page one of itcome to empty the family’s earth closetdiscreetly, at dusk, as is his wont,and bringing news of the rare Lizard Orchid.

He is jack-of-the-jakes, the trusty bog-wallahwho makes good compost out of night-soilbecause shit happens whether we like it or not.

The night-jar is his familiar birdpuck-bird, jenny-spinner, dor-hawk, moth-owlflying toad, night hawk, puckeridge, goat-suckernever making a nest and next to invisibleagainst any brown mottling under the sunon heathy wastes and bracken covered slopesor cloughs and corries on the hillswhere bracken’s mixed with ling.Its twilight purring thrills the nerves in us.Jefferies gave his marks to a gipsywho ‘was born on the earth in a tent’,‘loves the crescent moon, the clatter of the fern-owl,the beetle’s hum’ and ‘the evening star’.

But then Jefferies had an eye for him, though nameless.He found him in the brown River Barlewho splashes in the sun like boys bathing -like them he is sunburnt and brown.He talks and laughs and singslouder than the wind in the woods.He found him again as a ditcherhis hands black and grimy, his brown facesplashed with mudleaning on his shovelin the deep ditch his seemed like a voicefrom the very earth